Champions League

Elena Fermuș
I was at the train station. A sad little girl in shabby clothes handed me a piece of cardboard and asked to write LOOKING FOR MY MOMMY on it. I was in a hurry but I did as she asked. Then I kept seeing her. The next day, the next week. Everyone ignored her. Who the hell had time for another sob story? I looked at her features. No doubt her parents must have been beautiful. And that's about all I could tell. I took her with me. No one ever came looking for her. It's been 20 years since then. Today she has her own foundation and helps homeless children. And every day, on every piece of cardboard, she writes me YOU ARE MY CHAMPION.

Ionuț Morariu
He was a seminary student when he lapsed into the sin of onanism. He only renounced his shameful iniquity after his ordination, only to replace it with something even more wicked: adultery. With time, his hair turned grey and his obstinacy dwindled. But the burden of his sins only grew heavier. He had become acquainted with simony, covetousness, avarice. When the day came for him to be ordained as a bishop and the sons of man kissed his right hand as if he was the Patriarch, he wasn't at all surprised. He had understood that, be it in depravity or virtue, God loves a champion.

Gheorghiță Mircea
You're in for some miserable weather if you venture into Cumbria in late November. Having been stranded near Royston Vasey, in the chilling wind and rain, I knocked on the door of something called The Champions League local store. A married couple welcomed me in. One of them was wearing women's clothes and their smiles revealed two sets of rotten teeth. I was hungry and all that mattered was eating and getting some rest. I knew that dark, perverse and horrifying things happened in the area so I killed them and I ate the woman's liver with beans.

(Translated by Bogdan Nicola / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year I / Corrected by Silvia Petrescu, coordinator of the translations)


Real Fiction is a collective project started in 2013 by Florin Piersic Jr. The concept of Real Fiction continued to exist as a Facebook group, after a volume of stories was published at Humanitas Publishing House. (In April 2024, the group has 12,860 members.) The authors write ultra-short stories, with the texts limited to 500 characters (in Romanian, so the length of the English translation might be a little different) - a flash-fiction exercise on a topic that changes every few days. The group's coordinators are Florin Piersic Jr., Gabriel Molnar, Răzvan Penescu, Luchian Abel, and Vlad Mușat. (Drawing by Adrian T. Roman)

Versiunea în română a acestui text se poate citi aici, în rubrica Ficțiuni Reale.